Mittwoch, 14. Oktober 2009

Cheat neutral - offsetting saves the world

Cheat neutral – without additional pain and suffering

Cheating on your partner usually causes grief and suffering. But it doesn’t have to be like this. Now you can offset the pain by paying someone else to be faithful. This way the amount of cheating on the world is limited to the current level and the total balance is even. We can make this world a better place. Register at www.cheatneutral.com and find someone to be faithful for you so you don’t have to be. Or even better – if you are faithful already let others pay you for that.

Cheating neutral – 12 minutes that are worth the time.

A simple solution that is already working today

This is not a new solution. We already do it with our carbon emissions. Europe for example wants to reduce its emissions by 20-30% until 2020. But reducing carbon emissions means you have to invest into expensive clean technologies or even worse – change our precious lifestyle.

Since this would reduce our wealth and the money we can make here, politicians figured out a way to limit the efforts that have to be undertaken by our companies (and us as consumers) – we can go on like nothing happens. Companies just give money to developing countries and reduce emissions there. That is much cheaper than develop new technologies and reduce the carbon at home. This is called carbon offsetting.

Offsetting means cheating on developing countries

While offsetting might work for reduction targets of 20-30%, it won’t work if we take into account that we will have to reduce our emissions globally by 85% until 2050. To reach that goal we have to reduce our global emissions dramatically and also the developing countries have to reduce their emissions. If the wealthy industrialized countries use all cheap possibilities in the global south today, the developing countries won’t have chance to reduce their emissions later because all the cheaper and easier ways are all ready used to brighten our statistics. Once again we pretend to help them and instead we only ensure our way of living and our markets to expand.

For the fight against global warming we need new and green technologies. If the companies have the possibility to get the carbon reduction by paying a little bit of money they won’t invest into new technologies. We just buy some time (which we don’t have) and don’t solve the problem itself. That is everything but not sustainable.

The industrialized countries lived for decades off the cheap and dirty energy we produce. We already used up more than our fair share of the worlds resources. The only reason the world didn’t collapse before is, that there are still billions of people living under poorest and simplest conditions.

Instead of using backdoors for our responsibilities we have to invent new and clean technologies, reduce our own carbon emissions and pay for our climate debts by giving poor countries knowledge, money and technology to hold them from making the same mistakes we did.